Killer bees make honey to die for

Monday, May 15, 2000 | 10:13 a.m.

Reed Booth has a love-hate relationship with killer bees.

The Bisbee, Ariz., resident claims to be the only beekeeper in the country who sells honey produced by the Africanized honeybee. He used to make his living with honey from the tamer European honeybee, until the killers moved in about seven years ago.

The European bees would let him walk up to their hives, harvest the honey and walk away. Dressed only in a hood that covered his face, he could gently brush the bees aside as he went about his task.

Now when he approaches the 16 hives he maintains at Reed's Aviary he's covered head-to-toe in protective clothing. "Beekeeping used to be a lot of fun, but not anymore. When I get within 20 feet of the hives it feels like hail hitting my suit. I can smell the venom dripping from their stingers," he said.

A graceful exit is no longer possible.

Booth runs to his van, throws the honey into the back and speeds off. But he doesn't go straight home from his honey farm in the desert. "I drive around with the windows down until all the bees are gone. They'll chase me for a mile," he said.

Booth is a beekeeper and exterminator. But rather than kill them he removes them from the property, where they are not wanted, and takes them to his hives. "I get paid to remove swarms, so I take the money and the honey," Booth, who has compiled a long list of bee puns, said.

His most frightening encounter with the Africanized bees occurred about 18 months ago in Bisbee, a former mining town in the mountains 100 miles southeast of Tucson and six miles north of the Mexican border.

The bees nested in a vacant, rundown house. The owner thought he would get rid of them by using bug spray.

Minutes later it was like a scene out of "The Birds," a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in which birds terrorized a small town. A woman driving by with her window down was attacked and stung 500 times. Seventeen people were stung and eight of them were sent to the hospital.

Booth was called in to kill the bees.

"When I got there an hour after it began rescuers were still hosing the area down," he said. "A four-block area was roped off. The bees were stinging people, dogs and even birds. Inside the house was a hive of between 80,000 and 100,000 bees. Anything over 80,000 is big."

Booth said that Africanized bees will move into an existing hive or kill the European bees that live there and steal their honey, taking it to their own hives. "They are mean," he said.

Which is why more beekeepers aren't selling killer bee honey.

Booth said that the killer bees will be the salvation of the beekeeping industry, which has been hit hard in recent years by the appearance of Asian mites that have been wiping out bee colonies all over the county.

"The Verroa mites, a few years ago, killed 90 percent of the wild European honeybee population and beekeepers lost 60 to 70 percent of their hives," he said. But the hardy Africanized bees are resistant to the mites.

"The killer bees will pick mites off each other and actually fly off with them and drop them in a field," Booth said.

The mite infestation is pretty much under control, Booth said, but between the mites and the Africanized bees, the European bees have not fared too well. Booth predicts that within five to 10 years the aggressive bee will be found in every state.

It is reported that the bees prefer hot, dry climates, but Booth said that is a fallacy. "Bisbee is in the mountains and in the winter it gets down to below freezing at night," he said.

If the killer bees dominate their environment, Booth doesn't see that as bad. "The killer bees are more active and produce twice as much honey as European honeybees," he said.

Brazil, the first country in the Americas to have killer bees, has gone from having practically no honey industry in 1956 to being one of the top five producers in the world today.

Since the bees took over his hives Booth has been marketing a product through a mail-order and delivery service called "Killer Bee Honey Butter" gift packs. He said that the honey will be available in some Las Vegas outlets in the fall.

As a sort of monument to his new business partners, Reed has in his living room an old wooden cabinet he found that housed a beehive. When he found the piece of furniture in a yard he opened the cabinet doors and found a bizarre site -- sitting on the shelves was an assortment of items such as roller skates, books and an animal skull. A honeycomb surrounded the items.

He put a Plexiglas back on the cabinet and put the cabinet against a wall in his living room. He drilled a hole in the wall and the cabinet and used a one-inch tube to create a passageway for bees from the out-of-doors into the cabinet, creating a sort of ant farm.

"They can come and go as they please," he said.

Jerry Fink

is an Accent feature writer. Reach him at jerry@lasvegassun.com or 259-4058.